Well, this is a long old run-up to the 2009 set of football games, isn’t it? I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m finding it particularly tough to cope this year. Last year was bad enough—I thought October and PES2008 would never come (and now I wish they hadn’t)—but this year my impatience and hunger for both FIFA09 and PES2009 seems at least twice as bad.

In the meantime I am still playing the PSP version (needless to say) of PES2008, and FIFA08 on the PS3. I haven’t spoke directly about my ongoing careers (in Master League and Manager Mode respectively) for several posts. There’s been so much else going on. And, in truth, I do kind of feel that I’ve already said everything I want to say. At this stage, with FIFA09 and PES2009 so close, there’s an air of unreality hovering around both of my current games. So I’m really going to be focused on the approach of the 2009 games from now on.

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Having said that, it’s still worth taking a look at the end of season 2021 in my Master League on PES2008. I actually finished season 2021 on the PSP a week or so ago. I’m well into season 2022 right now.

It was a spectacular end to the season, one of my very best. I scored tons of goals and ran away with the title. After I secured the championship (five whole games early) it was quite instructive to just play the ball around a bit in my last few meaningless fixtures. With nothing to play for I stroked the ball around, trying to keep possession and score wonder goals. At times it was productive. But at other times I saw yet again just what lengths the PES AI will go to to control the rhythms of play and massage micro-outcomes for the sake of its bigger picture.

Here’s a clip that I’ve been sitting on for several days (painfully, in every sense). It shows me trying to pass the ball out wide during a spell of ungodly CPU pressure. Watch what the game brazenly does with this straightforward pass:

The game doesn’t even try to disguise its dirty tricks any more, does it? It makes the ball go straight through my player’s leg and into touch for a CPU throw-in. I was absolutely disgusted. It’s at times like this that I wonder how I ever got into ISS/PES in the first place. Has it always been like this? I don’t remember incidents like the above happening very often—or at all—in the distant past. But maybe I’m mistaken.

I had to put up with a couple of pretty shocking defeats toward the end of the season. In particular there was a torrid game against Barcelona where I felt like a helpless spectator rather than a supposed participant. PES over the past few years has been inching ever closer to that most dangerous place for any sports-based game: a largely interactive script where the ‘gameplay’ is tantamount to an extended Quicktime event.

Ho hum. A year ago when I started blogging about my daily PES habit, I never dreamed I’d spend so much time being so bitter about the transparently scripted nature of some elements of the game.

Will PES2009 see an end to incidents like the one in the above clip? No, I don’t think so either.

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After the season I was curious enough to check my league win percentage. I also checked all the other seasons’ percentages, from 2007 to 2020. For curiosity’s sake, here’s the full list of my win % from the start of my career to the present:

2007 - 0.0% (!)
2008 - 21.43%
2009 - 21.43%
2010 -28.57%
2011- 50%
2012 - 36.67%
2013 - 50%
2014 - 56.67%
2015 - 63.33%
2016 - 60%
2017 - 60%
2018 - 76.67%
2019 - 66.67%
2020 - 74%
2021 - 83.33%
2022 - 60% (so far, after 12 games)

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And that’s the current state of play between me and PES2008. Like I said above, it all feels very odd playing this game (and FIFA08) with the next, super-duper clutch of games just around the corner. I am still playing, though, and next time I’ll post an update about my progress in FIFA08.

Over the 13.5 seasons that I’ve played through so far on my Master League career on the PSP/PS2 version of PES2008, a couple of teams have rarely (or never) given me much trouble. I’m tempted to include the likes of Barcelona and Real Madrid—and even AC Milan—in this bracket. Certainly every time I’ve bumped up against them, most of the time I’ve come away with the win. And an easy win at that.

Granted, once or twice their megastars have launched a traditional PES ’surprise attack’, and pummelled me into submission. But otherwise, I rarely have much trouble. It’s an accepted truism of Master League that the toughest teams to play against are, more often than not, the supposed lesser teams. The alleged minnows.

Now I wouldn’t class Sevilla as being minnows in real life. This may be ludicrously wide of the mark, but I perceive them as being the Newcastle United of Spain: a renowned name fallen on perennially hard times. In PES2008, after playing them twice per season for the past 10 seasons since gaining promotion to Division 1, I’ve rarely had any trouble against them. But oddly, over the past season, all of that has changed.

Suddenly, I find myself struggling to beat them. At times they exhibit Valencia-like resistance and stubbornness.

Every PES player (the Master League players, at any rate) is all-too-familiar with the individual matches where your players seem frozen in ice from the start. Where you can barely string two passes together before the CPU players come steaming in like nimble tanks and take the ball off you. Where all your shots scream high, wide, and not very handsome. Where innocuous challenges (or even no challenges at all) result in free kicks for the CPU, and yellow or red cards for your hapless players.

I’ve started having such games regularly against Sevilla. I have to go back to one of my oldest theories when it comes to Pro Evolution Soccer. I believe that deep within the game there are lines of code that determine how your team will fare against specific other teams over the course of set periods within a Master League career.

Before I started struggling against Sevilla, the team that used to always trip me up was Osasuna—a true minnow of Division 1 who were relegated back at the end of season 2019. I was happy to see them go. My troubles with Sevilla began in 2020…

Yes, what I’m alleging here is that the anti-human mojo bestowed upon Osasuna by the game was transferred to Sevilla after Osasuna were relegated. The patterns of the games are just too similar for it to be anything other than a deep, dark consipracy against me.

I believe that I have cracked PES2008 and that I can play it as well as it is possible for me to play it. My purchase of Ronaldo (the Brazilian one) as a 20-year-old Regen in the mid-season negotiations just gone will, I believe, clinch the Treble for me this season. In the half-dozen games since, I’ve played Ronaldo as often as his form and stamina would allow. I’ve played him in every position up front (in my 4-3-3). At his peak in real life he was a great, great player—few would dispute that; and in PES2008 I have so far found him to be one of the top 5 strikers I’ve had the pleasure of playing with. He scored a couple of vital goals in the 2nd leg of the D1 Cup Quarter-Final (I went through to the Semi).

And I’m still playing great with all my other players. Mustn’t forget them. As my squad list shows I have a roster of galacticos to call upon. Even for me, an average player, it’d be hard not to win almost every game when I can easily field a stunningly talented team all the time.

And then came Sevilla. I was something like 10 points clear at the top of the table. I hadn’t conceded more than about three goals in my last seven league games. I’m playing PES2008 on the PSP full-time lately; there’s just too much else going on on my PS3 for the PS2 version to get a look-in. The game is a touch harder on the handheld console, with its restricted controls and smaller screen. It just feels different, and this translates into a subtly altered kind of gameplay. It’s faster (if that were even possible), and it’s harder to defend. There are more goals. Despite this I was defending pretty well, and scoring tons myself.

Sevilla scored three goals against me in the first half. I pulled one back before half-time to make it 1-3 going into the break. But, still. I was in shock. There was no way that should have happened. Each of their goals was a joke. My players stopping dead, not responding to button-presses. For all that we moan and moan (and moan…) about our players’ delayed responses to button-presses, it’s better to have a delay than to have no response at all. That’s what was happening to my players all over. When PES makes up its electronic mind that it’s going to tilt the balance of a match in its favour, there are no half-measures. It just does it, and you have to like it or lump it.

Like most PES players, I’ve learned to live with it. I try to work around it as much as possible, and just get on with the game. I made up my mind that I would come back in the second half to beat Sevilla 4-3. I set about doing so. I gave it my all, really exerting myself to the utmost. And I brought it back to 3-3 with plenty of time left in the game to get the winner, but it was Sevilla who scored next, making it 3-4 with minutes remaining. After the restart there was no time to mount more than a token foray towards their goal, and it was quickly snuffed out (with suspicious ease).

This one defeat wasn’t a setback. I’m still going to win the title by a good distance. But I always hate these kinds of blatantly scripted matches. Lately it seems that the game doesn’t even try to be subtle about it. I’m always forcibly reminded that all I’m doing is pressing buttons in a computer game. For a few years now it’s been a constant complaint of PES players that there is just too much funny business going on far too often. This has got to change. If scripting is a necessity (and there’s a strong argument that it is), then it has to be more understated, more behind-the-scenes. I find it unforgivable, for example, to have my player’s ability to trap a straightforward pass disabled simply because the CPU wants to get possession back. This and similarly atrocious measures have been visited upon us for far too long, and things have got to change.

Here in season 2020 of my Master League career on the PSP/PS2 version of PES2008, I’ve just won the league title with several games to spare. I’m in the Division 1 Cup final and the European Cup semi-final. The Treble is very much on.

After winning the Treble last year, I badly want to win it again this year. It’s only natural. For me, winning back-to-back Trebles would be the ultimate confirmation that I’ve mastered PES2008 in terms of its gameplay. I’ve won a few Trebles in the past in this career, but never consecutively. In PES4 and PES6 I was capable of winning back-to-back Trebles without much effort. I found those two PESes pretty easy overall, so it’d be a yardstick for PES2008 if I could replicate my achievements now.

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As well as the general goal of a Treble, I had two bonus targets: to navigate through to the end of the league season unbeaten, and concede less than 20 goals while doing so. For a long time this season, it looked as if I would succeed on both fronts. And then I stupidly let my newfound confidence get the better of me. I lost a game to Valencia, my long-standing divisional rivals.

That hurt, but at least I was keeping the goals-against column down to respectable levels. As I’m remarked previously, it seems a lot harder to stop the CPU from scoring goals in this version of the game than in any previous versions.

In PES5, for example, it was customary for me to concede around 10-15 goals per season. Here in PES2008, especially in the early seasons of this ML, I was shipping an average of 30 goals per season. I’ve complained to high heaven about the CPU apparently waltzing the ball into the net with my players either rendered immobile or ludicrously unable to put in a routine challenge (or challenges) to stop the attack. In other words, I was asserting that most of the goals scored against me were scripted.

Scripting is a serious topic for football game fans, and for PES fans in particular. If scripting is real, and if it’s as bad as we sometimes think it is, then what would be the point of playing any football game? Wouldn’t we be complete fools simply to press buttons whilst watching an interactive script unfold before our eyes? Yes, we would be complete fools.

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Wanting to concede less goals than normal is my own little way of challenging myself, and of testing the sturdiness of the alleged behind-the-scenes script. I wanted to see if it really was true that half the CPU goals were inevitable and unstoppable, or if it was just me not concentrating properly, being reckless, being too attack-minded—in short, defending badly.

It might be too early, but I’m pleased to report that the answer would seem to be that it was all my fault. This season so far I’ve conceded 12 goals. With three league games left, unless I suffer a compete catastrophe in a game or two, I think I’m going to meet my target. We’ll see.

None of which means that scripting per se isn’t true. Scripting in PES is very much true. It’s real and it’s annoying and it doesn’t belong in a mature, serious football game. In my opinion. All that my little mini-experiment with defending shows is that with concentration you can drastically cut the number of goals you concede. I’d still say that 75% of the goals I have conceded were predestined and frankly unstoppable.

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In league game 28 I actually lost another game—my second of the season. Real Zaragoza beat me 2-1. I was actually more bothered about conceding those two goals than I was about the defeat.

It was very like the 2-1 defeat I took from Valencia earlier this season. The same scoreline and pretty much the same reason for it—over-confidence bordering on arrogance from me. When you head out onto the virtual pitch assuming you have a right to win the game, a lot of the time it’ll work out for you—if you’ve got enough experience in the game to back up your belief. But when you’re at 1-1 and the CPU is plainly up for a fight, and you ignore all the warning signs and push on regardless, looking for a winner that the game is in no mood to let you have, well, that’s a mistake. Best to shut up shop, accept that the game is a draw, and see if you can’t snatch a cheeky winner on the break toward the end. That’s what I’ve done countless times already this season to great effect and it’s what I should have done on this occasion. But I didn’t.

Like I said, conceding two goals was the most hurtful side of it. That’s 14 goals against me all season. I should still make it to the end with less than 20 conceded, but it’s looking like being a lot closer than it could—and should—have been.

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Happily, in Europe there was better news. I met Lazio in the semi-final of the game’s Champions League equivalent. It’s the third or fourth time, in total, that Lazio and I have faced off in European competitions over the seasons. They beat me in a European Champioship final a few seasons ago. I’ve generally found them to be alarmingly tough opponents, almost on a par with my domestic nemesis Valencia.

On this occasion, though, Lazio were pussycats. I won the first leg 1-2 at their place. With those two away goals to my name, I regarded the second leg as pretty much a formality—a dangerous thing to do, yes, but I got away with it. I won that second leg by the mammoth scoreline of 6-1. The only dowside was conceding that solitary goal, but that was near the end when the game was over anyway.

All of which leaves me having to win just the two Cup finals to win the Treble. My second Treble in a row, hopefully. And I have to try not to concede another 6 goals in my remaining three league games. I think I am going to do it on all fronts.